Everything that is written stems from the fact that it will
forever be impossible to write, as such, the sexual relationship.1
After translating and reviewing the translations of colleagues who worked with me on the Italian edition of Scilicet, There is no sexual relation, it is evident that the work of translation is of the order of the impossible. There is no perfect translation capable of rendering a text in its entirety. Rather, there are diverse translations, each produced in an attempt to approach, to capture as closely as possible, the real that each text carries in itself.
But it is precisely because of the "there is no" that as the Scuola Lacaniana di Psicoanalsi [SLP], we are still here translating and trying to convey – by building bridges between languages – what the analysts of Jacques Lacan's and Jacques-Alain Miller's School "make known", to paraphrase the meaning that Lacan gives to the title Scilicet, namely: you can know…. what the School thinks.
In his now classic text Experiences in Translation, Umberto Eco chooses a title that says a lot about the impossibility of translation: Saying almost the same thing. In fact, on the one hand, it is never the same thing, it is almost the same, because each text reinterprets language as including something of the lalangue of a singular parlêtre, which is always untranslatable. And on the other hand, while dealing with experiences of translation (and not interpretation, which is generally oral), Eco uses the word "to say" [dire].
In fact, at the heart of each written text – even short ones, such as the 107 texts written by our colleagues from the WAP, in addition to three texts by Christiane Alberti, Jacques-Alain Miller and Ricardo Seldes presenting the theme of the Congress – there is a singular saying that takes shape through common language, that traverses language in a singular way and which precipitates into a written text. It is the author's letter, which, as Lacan puts it, is "a trace in which an effect of language can be read [se lit]".2 Obviously, in the case of Scilicet, in addition to the five common languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, English and Italian), there is the common language of the World Association of Psychoanalysis which, precisely because it exists, has helped us greatly in our translation work.
Nevertheless, the goal, or ambition, of the translator is the same as what Lacan clearly indicated in "The Instance of the Letter", namely to "strive to preserve the sovereign signifierness of the speech he proffers".3 A practically impossible task since, according to Jacques-Alain Miller, every language resists psychoanalysis in its own way. In fact, each language covers the hole in the real with its own stylistic features. Each language is "making the disk go around, that disk that turns because 'there's no such thing as a sexual relationship'".4 We could say that there is no relation between one language and another because there is the real unconscious, the One of jouissance, the opaque jouissance that allows no "friendship", that is, no relation, as Lacan indicates in his "Preface to the English Edition of Seminar XI". Jouissance, as you can read in Jacques-Alain Miller's beautiful text,5 is always substitutive and does not suit speaking beings – it makes of each of us a lonely one, who, "when one leaves it all alone, it sublimates with all its might"6 as soon as we open our mouth. It sublimates or invents, it substitutes to cope with the 'fatal destiny' of the sexual non-relation. This is why there is no knowledge that can be written at the level of sex.
To be more specific about the task of translation, we can first note that temporality of translation is always after; after the reading, or, rather, after several readings, starting from the text which, as it happens in the experience of analysis, produces re-readings, translations, interpretations and shifts of positions. This is the real work of translation; the translated product, on the other hand, as "final" product, is always a failure, a more or less forced choice which, however, has important effects in that it limits and determines what the subsequent reading will be. It is inevitable: something of the vitality and potential of the original language is lost, is no more. Not to mention the unique style, which is untranslatable.
As Lacan pointed out in his Déclaration à France Culture in 1973, a translation "is always a reduction, and there is always a loss in translation; […] this loss is the very real of the unconscious, the real, full stop. The real for the speaking being is that he gets lost […] in the sexual relation".7 For this reason, it is useful to read the translated text alongside the original, allowing oneself to be questioned by it, to be diverted, and to con-sent-iment [a(c)con-sentire] to it … so that the process punctures the translation itself.
Antonio Prete, Baudelaire translator and professor at the Collège de France, argues that "there is something in this alchemy (which is translation) that resembles the experience of love, or at least its tension,8 which, in any case, can only aspire to imperfection. He also emphasises the place where the work of translation is produced, which is "always in the shadow of another language", on the border between the languages…
Other experts on poetic translation suggest that all translations "are experimental by nature",9 even though they often start from a certain "congeniality" between author and translator.
We could say that, if it (the perfect translation) existed, it would be "intersinthomatic", in the sense that, according to Lacan, this is the only possible relation between the One-all-alone and his Other.
However, this only occurs in literature, when the translation and its original find a way to remain alive and resonate beyond time, each with its own style.
In our case, of course, we can only aspire to failure, to a translation with flaws, which tells us, once again, that there is no sexual relation.
[1] Lacan J., Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX , ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink (New York/London: Norton, 1999), p. 35.
[2] Ibid, p. 121.
[3] Lacan J., "The Instance of the Letter", in Écrits, trans. B. Fink, New York/London, Norton, 2006, p. 438.
[4] Lacan J., Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, op. cit., 34.
[5] Cf. Miller J.-A., A Fantasy, available online: congresamp.com.
[6] Ibid, 121.
[7] Lacan J., Déclaration à France-Culture à propos du 28 e Congrès International de Psychanalyse, Le coq-héron, 1974, n. 46/47, pp. 3–8. Unpublished in English. "c'est toujours une réduction et il y a toujours une perte dans la traduction; […] cette perte, c'est le réel lui-même de l'inconscient, le réel même tout court. Le réel pour l'être parlant c'est qu'il se perd […] dans le rapport sexuel."
[8] Prete A., All'ombra dell'altra lingua. Per una poetica della traduzione, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2011, p. 11. Unpublished in English.
[9] AA.VV., Congenialità e traduzione [Congeniality and Translation], Associazione Culturale Mimesis, Milano, 1998, p. 13. Unpublished in English.
